In 2007, A Blackwater Mercenary In Iraq Said He 'Could Kill' A US Investigator And Get Away With It

Blackwater earned a total of around $2
billion for providing armed personnel to the
Pentagon.

The top manager for the mercenary group Blackwater told a State
Department investigator that “he could kill
[him] at that very moment and no one could or would do anything
about it as we were in Iraq,” James
Risen of The New York Times reports.

State Department reports obtained by the time paint a dark
picture of the U.S. government's relationship in Iraq with the
military contractor, which had a contract worth more than
$1 billion to protect American diplomats.

“The Blackwater-State Department relationship gave
new meaning to the word ‘dysfunctional,’ ” Peter Singer, a
strategist at the New America Foundation, told
The Times. “It involved everything from catastrophic failures of
supervision to shortchanging broader national security goals at
the expense of short-term desires.”

American embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater
over the State Department investigators in the 2007
probe.

The threat by Daniel Carroll, Blackwater’s project manager
in Iraq, came weeks
before Blackwater guards fatally shot
17 civilians at a Baghdad traffic circle, an incident that
has led to one of the former guards being
charged with murder.

"Mr. Carroll’s statement was made in a low, even tone of
voice, his head was slightly lowered; his eyes were fixed on
mine,” Mr. Richter wrote in a memo to State Department officials.
“I took Mr. Carroll’s threat seriously. We were in a combat zone
where things can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when
issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative
security contract.”

Blackwater
reinvented itself after several years of grisly
incidents during the Iraq War
involving allegations of
stolen guns, murder,
war profiteering, and general recklessness like shooting
wildly in the streets.

In 2010, Blackwater founder Erik Prince sold the
company, which is now called Academi.
Princecontends
that the U.S. government threw him under the bus.

Following the threat, chief investigator Jean C.
Richterwrote a report documenting
misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight
of the company had created “an environment full of liability and
negligence.”

Richter noted that the “hands off”
management resulted in a situation in which “the contractors,
instead of Department officials, are in command and in
control.”

Risen notes that the"watershed moment in the American
occupation of Iraq," which ended in 2011 with
an Iran-brokered deal that left no American military
advisors behind.